Is Outsourcing SEO Offshore a Good Business Decision?

Outsourcing SEO offshore is becoming increasingly popular as a practical option for retrenching businesses. SEO companies in India and the Philippines, among developing countries, are the favorite choice from where SEO is outsourced. This is no surprise considering the fact that both countries have abundant supply of skilled laborers in the field of information technology.

Naturally, projects offered to western SEO companies have significantly declined crippling their operations. Western SEO companies go out of business while the opposite happens in the east. Unfortunately, some western SEO companies responded by maligning the quality of SEO services provided by offshore companies. To some extent, their sentiments are understandable but if you pay a close attention to their logic, you will realize just how self-serving it is.

Offshore SEO Service Equals Poor in Quality

This is the first attack you will commonly hear from western SEO companies. Somehow this is true, in the same manner that it is also true in the west. What I’m trying to say is, not all offshore SEO companies deliver crappy services and not all SEO companies in the west are reputable.

On the contrary, offshore SEO companies are in fact better than their western counterparts. In the west, SEO is mostly done as a part-time, home-based job. In India and the Philippines, SEOs work full-time in an office where SEO is their core business. They are not just housewives with minimal SEO training but they are highly skilled professionals with in-depth knowledge of SEO that has been acquired from intensive trainings.

In the Philippines, SEO professionals need to stay on top of their games. They go through a lot of trainings, seminars and workshops to have an edge over their peers, which explains why most of them have other skills like web design, graphic design, programming etc. This is a must if they want to keep their job. Why? Because competition is fierce. There are a lot of skilled SEOs but there’s a few position to fill. In essence, when you work with SEO businesses in India and the Philippines, you are working with the bests.

Language Barrier

One of the biggest challenges that SEO companies in the Philippines and India face is language. As most of their clients are coming from the US, UK, Canada and Australia, they need to use English in their SEO campaign. Since English is not their first language, you would expect problems with their grammar. Fortunately, this is not the case for all offshore companies. A considerable number of SEO organizations in India and the Philippines employ professional writers for their content needs. Some western companies resort to providing their own content to SEO companies to ensure correctness in grammar.

And to assume that these companies in the Philippines and India don’t know your objectives and don’t understand your priorities, simply because English is not their first language, is too much of an assumption. You don’t need to be an English speaker to understand that businesses operate for the same reason – to make profit. Proper realignment of your SEO strategies to achieve your client’s goals and objectives do not depend on your comprehension of the English language.

Exploitation

The main selling proposition of SEO outsourcing companies offshore is cost-cutting. This is made possible because offshore companies in general operate at a much cheaper cost. Employees are paid a meager salary, almost a third of what an American SEO is paid. Or is it really meager?

To compare two professionals from two countries based on their salary without taking into account their country’s standard of living is not fair. Similarly, saying that SEOs in India are exploited because they receive just a quarter of the salary paid to an American SEO, is moronic. The cost of living in India is much cheaper compared to the US, which means even if their salary is smaller, their purchasing power compensates for the difference.

Conclusion

Clearly, there are a lot of misconceptions about offshore SEO companies. Problems have been identified which are mutually exclusive to western SEO companies. Results from your SEO campaign is not correlated to whether you outsourced your SEO offshore or not. It’s more of how you chose your SEO company. Hence, we conclude that outsourcing your SEO offshore is not a bad decision, in fact, it can provide lots of benefits to your company.